What I have always respected about Rembrandt is that he told the truth. Where so many painters flattered, smoothed and arranged, he set down what was in front of him, including his …

I was walking back from Covent Garden on a wet December evening, the kind where the Strand’s Christmas lights smear across the pavement and every black cab throws up a little wake …

The first royal I was ever drawn to was not British at all. She was Austrian. On my early trips to Vienna I kept circling back to Empress Elisabeth, the one everyone …

For a long time I thought the Renaissance was an Italian story, and mostly a Florentine one. Botticelli, Michelangelo, the great dome over Florence Cathedral. It was only once I began visiting …

I had heard the name for years. Whenever something big was happening in London, a royal wedding, a jubilee, a state funeral, the cameras always seemed to be pointing down the same …

Walk into the medieval and early Renaissance rooms at the National Gallery in London and the walls turn to gold. Almost every panel is religious: a Virgin and Child, a saint, a …